Ask Jack #3 | Setting Goals | Jack Canfield

Hi, I'm Jack Canfield and welcome to this episode of Ask Jack and Patty. And this is Patty Aubrey. Patti Aubrey has been my business partner for over 30 years, co author of Somewhere Between 12 and 14 Chicken Soup for the Soul books. She's a master coach and trainer and we're going to be here to answer your questions. So what do we have here?

Well, today we're going to talk about taking action on your goals. So this is all about that. So the first question from Susie is I have this big goal but I'm getting. All my friends and my family and my co workers are telling me that I. It's ridiculous and they're not coming from a negative or they're not coming from a positive place. I'm not feeling the support that I need. So what should she do when that happens?

Well, you have to realize that most people when they see someone going for their dreams, it kind of threatens them because they're not going for theirs. And so it leaves them in a space of feeling, well, I'm settling for mediocrity while this other person is going for their dream. So my job is that kind of person is to pull you back down to our level. I found this. I was working in a factory once at a General Electric factory between college and graduate school. And there was a guy, he was a line worker on these machines. We're making stator motors for refrigerators. And all of a sudden he got promoted to be a manager. Now he comes to work, he's wearing a short sleeve white shirt, he's got a tie on and everyone's starting to give him a hard time about it, you know, oh, you think you're so good now because you're a manager. And they wanted to bring him back to their level, which was very challenging because he wanted their approval. He loved them, They've been friends for a while but now he had to take on a new role of managing them. And so you have to be willing to know that as you move forward, people are going to bring you down. When we started Chicken Soup for the Soul, Mark and I got a lot of interviews. We were the young guys coming out there going for our dream. Once we hit the top and we were like the number one best selling book series in the world, then people started attacking us. You know, it was amazing. The books are too nicey nice, they're Pollyanna, you know, whatever it is. So someone once said, you know, that the higher you up on it, you are on a tree. If you're an apple, those are the ones we throw the stones at because we can't reach them easily. So we're throwing a stone to try to dislodge them from the tree. But it's a good metaphor for the fact that you're going to have a lot of naysayers in your life that are going to want to put you down. And sometimes people are just negative. They just, they just, they love criticizing people.

Can I add to that?

Sure.

So I think also when we grow, it's uncomfortable for people, especially people that are in our lives that are used to us being there because it feels comfortable. And so now you're stretching and you're not settling. And so I would like to say, regardless of what they feel, you have to ask yourself the question, am I willing to settle so I can give up myself to be loved by you or to keep you in your comfort zone? Because over time that's going to eat at you and make you sick and miserable. And I mean, just do it for vanity's sake. I mean, you'll look better by going for that dream and then start to hang out with other people that are willing to support that dream. Sometimes we have to let go of some of those people in our lives to get to that next place.

Yeah, you want to find people that like you are going for their dreams. Sometimes they belong to new thought churches where people are much more positive. Sometimes they belong to investment clubs. Sometimes it's people that are in mastermind groups or people that are taking seminars, going to retreats, things like that, where those kind of people are congregating to support each other. And you can find those groups in your community. There's meetup groups, there's all kind of things. You can go online and discover those and start surrounding yourself with people who do support you. Because if you're in a constantly negative environment, and sometimes we find ourselves there if you're not careful and you don't protect yourself energetically, and I'll talk about how to do that in a minute. You're going to, you're going to find your energy goes down. You're going to get taken down with them. In my seminars, in our seminars you teach as well. We do this muscle testing exercise where we'll have someone come up on stage and we'll test their arm. Push down. They're real strong now. So I want everyone in the audience to think a slightly negative thought, not something intense, just like, I don't like your glasses. And get 300 people thinking, I thought person arm is totally weak. I Don't care how hard they resist because we're affected by that. But then I teach the person to surround themselves with imaginary water. Coming up like a 360 degree fountain of water. You're inside and it's all sparkly white light, sunlight. And they send that same negative energy. Arm, stay strong, ask them to stop. The water. Arm goes weak, bring the water back. Arm, stay strong. So there are tools you have for surrounding yourself with kind of a protective layer of energy. But you do that by intentionally imagining that by surrounding yourself with light, surrounding yourself with the shield. Doesn't matter how you do it, but that energy actually acts as a protection.

And that's sort of like the food, right? So that's almost like what you're feeding yourself. That that's to keep you neutral. But the thing that I hear every day, and I do tons of mastermind groups and people from breakthrough success and train the trainer. They say at the end of the year and all during the year, all my colleagues think I'm crazy. I have a designer who's branching out and wants to leave his big design company and he's like, my friends think I'm nuts. I'm like, it's okay. I mean, my friends thought I was nuts too. When we started chicken soup, my father told me I was crazy to work for you, you know, and that was in the beginning. So it's. So you have to have that, that, that outside field of that group of people. If you're not in that, I don't. Unless you're a superman or superwoman, I think it's impossible to keep it.

Well, one thing you can do is when you things like your father said and so forth, just say thank you for your point of view.

Oh, exactly. We got thank you for your point of view.

I know, I know you've done very, very well. But the point is to know that you're going to get critics, you're going to get naysayers, you're going to get people who don't believe in your dream. It's just part of the territory. And so you have to be willing to know that's going to happen. Have a thick skin, if you call it that and just say thank you for your point of view. I remember when I told my ex wife I wanted to start a foundation and she said, with what? We don't have any money. How are you going to start a foundation? I said, we're going to start a nonprofit 501c foundation and we're going to take the money from this conference we put on for teachers. We're going to protect that money. So we can use that money to put on next year's conference. And she thought I was crazy. And I said, thank you for your point of view. Appreciate it. Went out and started the foundation. Since then, that foundation has got over 850,000 people in California off welfare. Through a program we created called the Goals Program. So they can't see it. People couldn't see Walt Disney's vision of Disneyland. You know, I think with Art Linkletter, Walt said, I want you to come down to Anaheim. And Art, for those you don't know. Was a famous television personality. Back in the 60s, 50s, whenever it was. And they walked through all these orange groves in Anaheim. And he said, and here's where we're gonna have Fantasy Land. Here's we're gonna have Future Land. Here's we're gonna have Frontierland. And Art couldn't get the vision. And Art later said, every step I took that I said no. Cost me at least $10,000. 10,000, 20, 30, 40, 50. Millions of dollars. He couldn't see the vision that Walt saw. And you know, the same thing with the guy who started Microsoft. The guy who started Dell Computers.

Everything big.

And Apple Computers, they started in the garage. Everyone thought they're crazy. So just know that's going to happen. Be willing to just push through it. Surround yourself with the other dreamers that are out there. Because there are. And if you do that and you hang in there long enough. Like we did with chicken soup. 144 rejections. People told us to give it up. We hung in there first year. We sold 30,000 in the first, I think, half a year. And we sold a million the next year. And now we sold over 550 million books in 50 languages. So if we'd taken other people's point of view seriously, we would not be sitting here.

All right. You ready for the next question?

I am.

This is from Cindy. She said you mentioned three things. That stop most people from accomplishing their goals. Considerations, fears, and roadblocks. What are your favorite strategies for facing them, processing them, and dealing with them?

Well, first, let's explain what considerations, fears, and Roblox are. Anytime you have where you are and you want to set a goal to where you want to be. Three things always come up. Consideration, fears, and rulebook considerations. Are all the thoughts that you start to consider about. Oh, I can't ask my dad for money. No woman's ever done that before. That's not been legalized. In our state. Like, you know, in California, we've legalized marijuana. That had never been done before. First time they went to the moon. That had never been done before. Maybe you've never seen a person like yourself accomplish the thing you want to accomplish. You know, I think the woman who started Spanx, you know, one of the first women billionaires that actually made it and just didn't inherit it, like the Walton sisters from their father. And so, you know, she had to do a lot of stuff that was difficult and a lot of reasons not to achieve it. And people will tell you that. So people, you're going to hear other people's considerations, but most importantly, you can have your own thoughts come about why it's not possible. And the second thing that's going to happen, fears are going to surface. Fear of losing your money. Fear of being made fun of. Fear of being, you know, successful. Well, fear of being successful. Everyone's going to come out of the woodwork and ask you for money. How are you going to deal with that? There's all kind of fears that show up. Maybe a fear that if you pursue this, you're not going to be able to be a good mom or a good dad because you're going to be working too hard. Fear that you'll lose your marriage because you're working too hard. And then the third thing are roadblocks. Roadblocks are real things in the world that are roadblocks. Like if you wanted to open a marijuana dispensary in California before it was legal, that's a roadblock. You want to go on vacation to the ocean. Your wife wants to go to the mountain. That's a roadblock. You've got to deal with that. There may be rules that say that's not possible. You don't have the money you need. That's a roadblock. So just know all three of those things are natural. What most people do when they show up is they think, oh, my God, this must be the reason I shouldn't do this. And I like to use that analogy of whack a mole. I don't know if you've ever been to the arcade or Chuck E. Cheese or someplace like that. And they have this thing called a whack a mole. And you put your dollar in and there's these holes, and you get a hammer, and then these little mole heads pop up randomly, and you got to hit them before they go back down. So when you set a goal that you've never set before, these considerations, fears and roadblocks come up. And the gift of that is they were always there. Those thoughts, those fears that were always subconsciously in you, stopping you from doing what you wanted to do. But when you had the courage and the boldness and the bravery to set a bold goal, then they start showing up. Now at least you can handle them. So the question is, how do you handle them? So for considerations, what you have to do is create an opposite thought. So if you think you, you don't know enough, start believing you do know enough. If you, if you don't know enough, there are other people who do. You can hire consultants, you can read books, you can buy manuals, you can go online. There's all kinds of solutions for not knowing enough. The second thing with fears, remember, all fears are self created by imagining something tragic in the future. Losing my money, the factory burning down, my husband, leaving me, my children saying, you work too much, whatever it is, but it's all in the future. So you have the ability to start visualizing the positive outcomes. That's why we say visualize your success. What would it look like if it did work out instead of visualizing what it wouldn't work out. There's also a new technology called tapping. Eft tapping. I wrote a book with Pamela Bruner called Tapping into Ultimate Success. But there are many books out there and YouTube videos how to tap on these nine acupuncture points. While you're thinking of the fear that you have, or feeling the fear that you have, and usually within three to five minutes, you can totally disappear. That fear has to do with acupuncture and how your brain's wired up and all that. I won't go into the science of that right now. But trust me, there's no reason for letting fear stop you. And the third thing is, I love what Tony Robbins says, if you can't, you must. You know, I think it was Eleanor Roosevelt said, you know, the very thing you're afraid of, if you were to do it, the way to get rid of the fear is to do the thing you're afraid of. I did the firewalk with Tony Robbins. I thought I was going to burn my feet. I did what he taught me to do. I didn't burn my feet. Then I had to ask myself, how many things have I told myself I'm afraid of and afraid to do that nothing bad would have happened.

Okay, so let me take that one step further.

Go ahead.

So you can make up these things. So for me, if I have to, my, like, secret weapon is I can go down that road of I'm gonna burn my feet, but I'm making it up.

Yep.

So why don't I just make up something good to support what I really want, even though it's totally the opposite? Because my brain loves to go straight down to the dark hole like most of the world. Right. It's like, well, if I'm gonna make. If I'm gonna make up a story, I'm gonna make up an amazing good story that's gonna support me and I'm gonna start to create this new habit of good stories versus bad stories. And well, if it was possible, what would it look like? And you know what, even if it was the worst, if it was a total failure, what's the worst thing that could happen? And so just like reframing it into a new way. Just reframe. Kind of like have a little bell on your desk, like, oh, there I go again. But it's that awareness. Right. So what's one trick when you've been scared to death you had to reframe? I mean, there's got to be a.

Moment in my life.

Yeah.

Oh, I was. Well, I was afraid that if I got divorced from my ex wife that the world would think I was a bad person. If he's so good in teaching success, why can't he even make a marriage work? That I was going to be lonely and miserable, that my kids would never talk to me. I mean, on and on and on.

Did any of that happen?

No.

And was it painful?

It was painful when I told my wife I was gonna leave, of course, to watch someone I had loved for so many years feel the rejection, the pain. But actually, once that was over, no, everything worked out really well.

Right. So sometimes we have to go through that uncomfortable, crucial conversation or whatever it might be to get to the other side.

I think that's the big thing. It's uncomfortable, it's unfamiliar. It's not as scary as we think it is. We, we tend to make up way worse scenarios than actually happen in life. And as you said, if we're gonna make stuff up, why not make up something positive? Why not make up. It all worked out that I did become successful, that I am going to have a best selling book, that I am going to raise my children. They're gonna be happy. I mean, you probably were at times scared that you were out there working so hard and maybe your kids wouldn't grow up. Well, they're all in their 20s now and doing extremely well.

It's true. That's True, they. So far, so good. So just knock on what? Over there. But lastly, just remember that movie if you've ever seen it. You know, remember Freddie on the bus from Friday the 13th?

Yes.

If you give that ugly thought energy, it grows. And when the kids finally realize that if they just shot it down, he went away. So just remember Freddy, you don't have to make him grow. That's what I do.

One of my favorite Star Trek episodes ever was this holodeck on the ship. And whatever you believe was going to happen would happen. And so people that had. They would go in there and have these wonderful experiences. Other people go in there and have a hellish experience. And all it was showing you is you are creating your own reality with your thoughts and your beliefs and your images and all that good stuff.

So the Law of Attraction really works and even worked on Star Trek. So just remember that. I mean, this is like, we get what we think about. And I know it's hard, it is hard, but it doesn't have to be hard.

That's also a belief. It could be as easy as simply closing your eyes and imagining what you want.

Right. It's true. But then that having to move through it those first few times, like you said, it's uncomfortable, and then one day it's comfortable. So that's how I would. That's how I would try to reframe that. All right, let's go to number three from Aaron. How do you overcome the fear of failure? I got this one.

Okay, go for it.

I first, don't ever look at anything as failure. I always look at as like, what. What's the worst case scenario? So we talk about, like, minimum target, outrageous, and then worst, best. So for me, if I'm afraid that something's going to fail, like, well, what's. First of all, I say, what's the worst thing that could happen? So, for example, when we did a retreat, our first retreat we ever did, that I kind of talked you into, in a way, I was really, really scared. And when you said yes, so first thing is, I was afraid you'd say no. Then you said, yes, we'll do the retreat. Then I was even more scared, like, oh, my God, he said yes, now what do I do? And so then I completely freaked out and thought, well, what if I can't fill it? Or what if people don't want to come? And you're kind of asking me the same question. I'm like, oh, there'd be. It's gonna be great. So had to act as if. And then look at what's the minimum number of people we have to have? What's our target? What's our outrageous? To get myself out of that place where, for me, I feel like when I'm scared, sometimes I can just freeze. I literally am so frozen.

Yeah, well, use that phrase, scared to death.

Right. And I just didn't know what to do. So when I was able to come on, just get with the program and actually Chris Atwood helped me with this, but he said, what's the minimum number? And I realized the minimum number to actually make this work and have nobody die, like break even, was five people. And I thought, okay, I can do this. And so from there, then I could focus on the target and the outrageous. And at the end day, we actually got the outrageous. But without using that technique, I probably would have just crawled under the covers, turned on Netflix and locked all the doors.

You know, I would crawl under the covers and get into the fetal position and wait for a long time.

So do you have any other, like, little tips that you would do or anything else that you'd want to say on that? I think failure is this negative word and it's. Everybody goes through things. I mean, Steve Jobs was amazing and he had a lot of failures, but they're not really failures.

Well, reframe failure as learning experience. Experience.

Right.

You know, we did a couple of Chicken Soup books that didn't sell well. Like we did Chicken Soup for the Country Soul, and it really should have been Country Music Lover Soul. People didn't know who it was. We did a book called Chicken Soup for the Single Soul Only discover there were widow people who didn't want to be single. There were people that never got married because no one ever asked them. They weren't really happy about it. And then there were widows who people had died. And then there was people who really chose to be single. And so the book was trying to speak to all people. It didn't really do it that well because it wasn't targeted enough. And we learned the more targeted. The book was Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul, Chicken Soup for the Teacher Soul, Chicken Soup for the Baseball Fan Soul, whatever. Those books did very, very well because people knew who they were for and what they were about. That was a learning experience. I remember when we first started self esteem seminars, we did a guest event. We'd have these guest events where people would come and we'd run you through an evening of exercises similar to what we would do in a weekend and sign you up for it. And we sent out this mailing for doing a guest event on Tuesday, but it turned out to be the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Nobody goes anywhere Tuesday before Thanksgiving. They're all traveling to their families. So we had rented this room. We'd send all these people. We had all these assistant shop. I think. I think five people showed up. And I remember everyone feeling like we'd failed. We did a great event for those five people. I think we signed up three of them. But the point being, we learned don't do a guest event, you know, two or three days before a holiday. No one's gonna come. We don't do that anymore.

How about Super Bowl Sunday? We ran a. We ran a workshop on Super Bowl Sunday because we didn't. We didn't think it through, we didn't.

Look through to look at the calendar when the super bowl was going to be.

But here's the good news, actually. Right? But here's the thing. Some of the most. When I look back in the last three decades, some of the dumbest things we ever did are now the most funny. And they created. They made us more of who we are today. And so whether it's confidence, whether it's more ability to handle risk taking, whether it's showing up more fully, whatever it is, like, it's all perfect if you just. If you just believe it.

Tom was. Watson, who was the CEO of IBM, had a. Had a poster and went in the office, said, fail faster. Yeah, fail faster. I want some guy, I remember reading this that some guy had made a huge mistake and cost IBM millions and millions of dollars. And he was called into Tom's office and he said, I suppose you're asking for my resignation. He said, are you kidding me? You think I would fire you after we just learned a lesson that cost us not millions of dollars, that would be stupid to fire you. You just learned some important things. I wouldn't want to fight you. That just was an investment in the future. We still want you here because you know more than someone else new coming in would know about that. And so don't be afraid of failure. For starters, I like to write when I'm doing seminar. I'll put up on a flip chart. I'll write the word fail, F, A, I, L. Then I take the I and I'll add a little tail to it. That makes it another L. Now it's called fall. And so think about this. If you're teaching your young child to walk, whether they're a year and a half old, whenever you start doing that and they fall down. We don't go, oh, you failed.

You'll never walk. Forgiven.

You'll never walk. I'm going to give you 34 chances to do this. If you don't do it, I give up. No, we just keep doing it until they do it. And every time they fall, they're learning something more about balance, going too far forward, putting their weight back too far, whatever. And pretty soon they're walking, walking. So failure is just falling down. It's called learn from that. Get up again. Don't be afraid to fail. Obviously, visualize succeeding. But if you do have a setback, if you do something that doesn't work out, immediately say, what did I learn from it? Then get back in the saddle and keep on keeping on. Don't let failure stop you and don't.

Spend time beating yourself up. So like you said, go back to the saddle. Great things. All right, so thank you for the questions for this segment of Ask Jack and Patty, and we'd love to have more questions from you. So think about what that looks like. Think about this. If you were sitting in a room just with Jack or just with me, and you had something that you just wanted to ask us, just whatever it is, anything, think about what that would be and how we could help serve you and make your life easier, faster, more efficient and more fun. And we'd love to be able to answer it if we can.

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